Web accessibility (likely TID)

[Eric Scheid]

On 7/10/98 4:23 PM, Jonathan O'Donnell <jonathan@rmit.edu.au> hath 
written:

>Eric, you can never win this game.  If you write for a non-standard, then
>you risk that it won't work on anything.  If you write for a standard, then
>at least you have a chance that it will work on a wide variety of products.

As long as clients keep paying, then the game goes on. Even if you tell 
them its foolishness, they know that their competitor is paying the money 
to make their site look good, which means their site looks bad in 
comparison.

Personally, I detest the game as much as the next person -- I'd rather 
put the time and effort spent squishing bugs into writing more pages for 
the client.

>Writing to a standard like html 3.2 or html 4.0 is really the only chance
>that you have of future-proofing your Web pages.  

writing to a standard like XML, where you get to specify the DTD, is the 
more likely chance of future-proofing.

>Wasn't someone here talking about Web pages appearing on the front doors 
>of microwave ovens?

and think further beyond "where next will web pages appear", and consider 
"in what ways can hyperlinked pages be processed". Writing a web-robot of 
any kind is no longer a trivial task if you want it to digest the wild & 
woolly code that is the web. I saw a really neat hyper-text explorer 
t'other day ... it would map, crawl, extract links, and use fuzzy logic 
to decide which path to follow next. Then there are other browsers that 
are used by the blind, or the deaf ... crazy code and render-hacks just 
turn into gibberish for these.

>We have no idea what people are going to invent next.

Yet another device for displaying weirdly different html would be ... 
NS/IE 5.0 ;-)

I'm all for writing standards, which is why I'm backing 
http://www.webstandards.org/ in their push to get the browsers to support 
the standards. Go check them out.

e.